Interesting timing, wouldn’t you say?
Everyone who hasn’t spent the last few months in outer space or living under a rock knows there is a pretty big election already underway in Rockingham County. The county’s sheriff, Sam Page, is challenging incumbent state senator Phil Berger – that chamber’s president – in the May 2026 GOP primary.
The gloves are clearly off already in the race. Polling shows Page up big. Berger’s team is rolling out high-profile endorsements to try and slow things down. Their barrage included an April 10 endorsement of Berger from Alamance County sheriff Terry Johnson – a long time colleague and close friend of Rockingham’s sheriff Page.
As you can see, this endorsement went public on April 10. (Alamance is NOT part of Berger’s Senate district.)
Now, let’s move over to the NC General Assembly website. There, you can find all kinds of legislation and their details. We’re interested in House Bill 74, known as a “technical corrections’ document. “Technical corrections” are for editing / “correcting” bills that have already passed. Supposedly, only typos and other small errors like that are addressed on these technical corrections bills.
But, as you can see on the NCGA site, HB 74 went through four different versions before it got passed. The original version of the bill, filed February 10, made no mention of Alamance County nor its sheriff’s department.
Edition 1, filed February 11, also did not mention Alamance County or its sheriff’s department.
Edition 2, a committee substitute reported favorably on March 3, also did not include any mention of Alamance County or its sheriff’s department.
Edition 3 — identified as a Senate Appropriations/Base Budget Committee Substitute — was adopted on April 29. For the first time in the history of this bill, the following information was included:
Remember: The endorsement of Senator Berger by Alamance Sheriff Johnson went public on April 10.
Edition 4 — which went on to be the final version — also included the above excerpted language and was adopted on May 1.
This COULD just be pure coincidence. Nothing more. But the timing of it all — as we said earlier — IS interesting.
Anyone who is a coincidence theorist, I have a bridge I would like to sell them up in Brooklyn.
We now know the gong price for a Berger endorsement, $100,000 in taxpayer money.
What is also troubling about this situation is that it makes Berger very susceptible to pressure from the AG’s office. If far left Jeff Jackson wants something from here on out, Berger is always going to have in the back of his mind that the alternative to what Jackson wants may be a full blown investigation of the Alamance caper..
Berger constantly compromises our Senate majority to the special interests he panders to, but now he is potentially doing so with a major far left and very partisan Democrat kingpin.
The entire $4 million of taxpayer money in that section of the bill was all apparently just political payola to buy support for Berger in his primary. Rural volunteer fire departments are well known as centers of political influence and the rest of the money, $3.9 million, goes to them. They are clearly expected to return the favor and support Santa Claus Berger.
I had missed that earlier since I assumed Stokesdale was probably in Stokes County, outside Berger’s district. Research, however, has revealed that it is in northern Guilford County, smack in Berger’s district. So that is $3.2 million of taxpayer money to butter up a rural fire department in the Guilford County portion of Berger’s district and $700,000 to butter up the fire departments in the Rockingham County portion of his district, plus the $100,00 to encourage the endorsement of the Alamance County sheriff. It is Tammany Hall come to North Carolina. It is pay to play.
Does “the leadership” treat our entire state budget as one big political slush fund? There was a big “earmark” problem in Washington, DC, and it appears that we have a huge one in North Carolina as well.
The late Senator Roman Hruska (R-Nebraska) once said that “if a politician buys votes with his own money, he is called ‘corrupt’ but if he buys votes with the taxpayers money, he is called a ‘liberal'”.